Comment on is this the right way to establish boundaries with my nosy coworkers at the hospital?
BertramDitore@lemmy.world 4 months ago
My whole team and I work remotely, so it’s not the exact same situation as you, but I made a concerted effort from day one to set social boundaries with my colleagues. First week on the job my manager found out I’m single and offered to set me up with people. I acted very weird about it, purposefully exaggerating how uncomfortable the offer made me, and she got the hint. We have a very friendly and cordial working relationship, but she no longer pries into my personal life unless I volunteer information. Been happily working under her for four years now.
That work/life separation quickly filtered down to the rest of my colleagues, to the point where now they act a little weird when a company call starts to get personal. Mission accomplished.
I think the key thing is that you’ll never get through to people if they can’t read social queues. Sounds like your workplace cliques are filled with those types of oblivious folks, so you might just need to be completely explicit about keeping things fully professional. I’m lucky that my manager is emotionally intelligent, but that’s pretty rare these days.
Good luck!!
Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
I did the same, I’m polite, helpful and pleasant to be around. I also keep everyone at arms length and am very careful with how I phrase stuff, people in the office love me and understand I won’t be sharing personal stuff and I’m not interested in their personal stuff. If they wanna talk weather, TV shows or games I’m fine with that.
I was always polite and vague with how I declined their questions early on and eventually they got the hints.
dennis5wheel@programming.dev 4 months ago
would you write some examples for me to use?
Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Someone mentioned it down the thread but I say non committal stuff like ‘I’ll have to sit on it’ ‘it be that way sometimes’ ‘that’s interesting’ ‘I don’t know much about that’ ‘not sure to be honest’ ‘oh yea?’ ‘I hear ya’ ‘if it makes them happy’ ‘that’s how some people like it’ ‘I haven’t looked into it’ ‘I haven’t considered it’ ‘that’s what I hear’
It all depends on context but I use these replies to let them know I hear them without picking a side if that makes sense. It’s best to act like you aren’t sure or don’t know when they ask about stuff.
Here’s an example from yesterday from the trump Biden debate.
They asked me if I was gonna watch and I just said I don’t know maybe, I was gonna leave it at that but they kept trying to sports team for Trump and pushing me to answer what I thought about them sitting so close. I took that chance to say I don’t really talk about politics at work, all the while typing away and working. That seemed to work and they took the hint and stopped.
It helps if you always act like you don’t know/aren’t sure about things.